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Temporary Voter Relief in Pennsylvania

A state judge on Tuesday brought some temporary relief to the democratic process in Pennsylvania, ruling that voters there will be able to cast a ballot for president next month even if they lack an ID card. If the ruling holds up, it will mean the failure, for now, of a Republican effort to disenfranchise minority and low-income voters likely to support President Obama.

But neither the judge, Robert Simpson, nor the State Supreme Court took the far more courageous step of tossing out the entire voter ID law for violating the rights of Pennsylvania citizens. Instead, Judge Simpson said there simply wasn’t time before the Nov. 6 election to ensure that no one would be disenfranchised by the law. In effect, he gave voters a few more months or years to obtain state IDs, missing the point that the cards are unneeded and unfair in the first place.

“I expected more photo IDs to have been issued by this time,” he wrote. “For this reason, I accept petitioners’ argument that in the remaining five weeks before the general election, the gap between the photo IDs issued and the estimated need will not be closed.”

The judge also refused to stop election officials from asking for ID cards at the polls. Those without identification can still vote, and they will not have to use provisional ballots. But for voters who aren’t keeping up with the news, merely being asked the question could create unnecessary confusion and fear.

Allowing officials to ask for unneeded ID cards makes little sense, but it fits right in with a law that from the start was based solely on political expediency and not on rational grounds. The fraud that the law purports to reduce does not actually exist, either in Pennsylvania or anywhere else in the country. Republicans made a strenuous effort to impose the ID requirement in swing states that Mr. Obama won in 2008, including Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania. One Pennsylvania legislator was caught on video admitting that the law would give the state to Mitt Romney.

Polls in the state suggest that’s very unlikely to happen this year, but these laws will live on as a sleazy legacy of voter suppression. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had a chance to strike it down, but instead told Judge Simpson last month simply to determine whether the cards were adequately distributed for this election. The judge, who had already ruled in August that the ID requirement was “reasonable” and nondiscriminatory, will hold another trial on the matter after the election. That means he still has time to change his mind, acknowledge reality and lift this offensive requirement from new generations of Pennsylvania voters.

A version of this editorial appears in print on October 3, 2012, on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Temporary Voter Relief in Pennsylvania. Today's Paper|Subscribe